Thanks to the digital camera, battlefield artists are quickly fading in relevance.

But handcrafted battlefield art often best evokes the realities of past armed conflict. Art from the skies of World War II is an fascinating genre unto itself.

Check out this blast-from-the-past aerial-combat art, a portal into the way aerial warfare used to be waged.

This post is originally by Geoffrey Ingersoll and Robert Johnson

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Until the arrival of dedicated units like the US Army Air Corps' "Burma Bridge Busters," low-level attacks on Japanese supply lines were carried out by Royal Air Force Hurricane fighter-bombers like the ones shown taking out a bridge here.

The Battle of Midway was one of the most decisive of the war. The Japanese outnumbered Americans four to one, but the US still trounced the Imperial Navy.

They called this American dive bomber the Dauntless — it scored the fatal blows against Japanese carriers in Midway. Pilots dived straight at their targets, which were unable to pull away until the last second.

This is what a German reconnaissance, or spy, plane looked like during WWII. It's a far cry from modern stealth aircraft.

The Japanese Rising Sun and American star are some of the most recognizable air-force symbols of WWII.

Tactics of the day would be considered brutish in our time. Here we see Allied forces bombing a dam to flood out downstream targets, something a conventional Western military probably wouldn't consider doing today.